Letters to the Editor 09-23-13

Why are the county supervisors so reluctant to let members of the public know how long we may speak to an agenda item at board meetings without fear of arrest for unlawfully disturbing the meeting?

District Attorney Michael Ramos dismissed a 2004 case filed on a near two-minute breach of the board's three-minute rule because Deputy DA Timothy Dixon told the media, "essentially" the defendant did "nothing wrong" in refusing to yield the rostrum after being told "his three minutes to speak had elapsed."

At the Board of Supervisors' last three regular meetings, during Public Comments, the rostrum asked the gavel: How long does First Amendment protection last at this rostrum?

Silence was the gavel's response, each time.

Bob NelsonHesperia

Tip of the iceberg

Re: "Taxpayer burden?" (Don Belanger, Letters, Sept. 3).

Mr. Belanger has addressed the issue of Wal-Mart costing taxpayers money but only depicted the tip of the iceberg.

The greatest cost to the taxpayer is the amount of Earned Income Credit we pay Wal-Mart employees.

The 900 people who signed the petition for the Apple Valley Supercenter election apparently are not aware of just how much more it will cost ... approximately $5,900 a year for each employee with three children. It's somewhat less for smaller families as they collect earned income credit on their federal tax returns.

Wal-Mart underpays its employee by about $7 an hour from the prevailing wage for a forklift driver.

Let's say the forklift driver gets paid $12.50 an hour instead of the industry $19.50 an hour. That employee has wages of $18,750 a year instead of $29,250 but has final "income" of $24,650, of which only the $18,750 is taxed or winds up about the same final net income per year as if he/she received the $29,250 in wages.

In the meantime, as Mr. Belanger pointed out, the employee is at the low income threshold for other state-provided benefits, which also adds to our tax burden.

Of course these same employees do not have the cash flow to pay their daily costs of medical, auto and home insurance so they do without until the windfall each April of earned income credit.

Adding 85 jobs to the community does not add revenue to the community, since more revenue is given out than is generated.

Irvin KettlerVictorville

Obama and scandal

Donna Pelonis ("Reality check," Letters, Sept. 26) believes that the Obama administration scandals are nothing more than conservative pipe dreams. The problem is that facts matter, and no amount of liberal wishful thinking can change that. Denying reality is not a strategy.

The House Ways and Means Committee recently uncovered emails from Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS scandal, in which she held up tea party tax-exempt applications in 2011. Specifically, she called tea party applications "problematic," and said "The tea party matter (is) very dangerous." This runs counter to the Democrats' mantra that tea party groups weren't targeted.

A retiring IRS tax lawyer, Carter Hull, testified under oath that the Office of the IRS Counsel was involved in targeting tea party groups for special scrutiny. William Wilkins, one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS, heads this office. This is the same man who in 2008 allegedly defended, for free, former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright in an IRS dispute.

According to recently declassified material, the Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions put in place by the Bush administration on NSA's use of intercepted phone calls and emails. This was done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. As one pundit said, "The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government's approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans' privacy later."

The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens stated under oath that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. The account is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. According to Gregory Hicks, a team was on its way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when (the leader) got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."

Who do you believe: The Obama administration or your lying eyes?

Tom JahnkeApple Valley

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